The GATE Grind

GATE 2026 BT – Question 14

Recombinant DNA Technology and Other Tools in Biotechnology · Analytical tools: Electrophoresis, microarrays, enzymatic assays, immunoassays, immunoblotting, flow cytometry, whole genome and ChIP sequencing · 1 mark · Multiple choice

Cancer cells display a high level of heterogeneity in the expression of TP53 protein. Which of the following techniques can be directly used to determine the intra-tumoral heterogeneity of TP53 expression in a given tumor sample, without resorting to additional cell separation techniques?

  1. Immunoblotting
  2. Flow cytometry
  3. ELISA
  4. Quantitative RT-PCR

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Correct answer: (B) Flow cytometry

Explanation

Flow cytometry measures the fluorescence of each cell separately, so a stained cell suspension gives the distribution of TP53 expression over the cell population. Immunoblotting, ELISA and RT-PCR give an average over the whole sample.